Have you given any thought to your retirement? Planning on pottering? Catching up on reading? Thinking you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it?

According to Prof. Bernardo Vidne, retirement can be more like jumping out of a plane than crossing a bridge – even if you are prepared. The story of Vidne’s working career is almost archetypical: From a poor childhood in Argentina, he rose to become head of the largest cardiac surgery department in Israel. In addition to some 40,000 surgeries – 10,000 on children – Vidne authored around 300 papers in medical journals and taught many students.

Prof. Bernardo Vidne and his Ph.D. adviser, Prof. Talila Volk

So maybe it is not a complete surprise that Vidne’s idea of the perfect retirement plan is to pursue full-time Ph.D. research in a molecular genetics lab, performing surgery on fruit fly hearts rather than human ones.

That plan fits in with Vidne’s philosophy, which he is eager to share: Never fulfill all of your goals. Once you’ve checked everything off your list, that’s when you start to die. Fortunately, it is never too late to set yourself new goals. And by all means, plan for that retirement, because it is in your future as surely as all those other things you have tried to plan for – career, partnership, children, etc.

That’s advice that most of us – though we may be slackers in comparison – can aspire to follow.